Disabled Books

This book is full of very helpful information. I believe it could be expanded by including a section for available funds for pre-college educational expenses. My son has Aspergers, Autism, PDD...and we have to send him to a private school to enhance his education. I am sure I am not alone in this category as public schools are overwhelmed by the increase of special kids. Private schools have the small class sizes needed, for a price. Medical benefits do not cover the educational needs. A section addressing this type of funding (grade, middle and high school) would be just the ticket.

Finding Help When Your Child Is Struggling In School is a valuable reference book for making sense of the many procedures and services parents come across when trying to help their child at school. Technical jargon and procedure can be daunting and options are sometimes many. Lawrence Greene encourages parents to stick at it. He offers strategies to use when dealing with teachers and many kinds of checklist for monitoring your own progress and your child's. He addresses the IEP(Individual Education Plan) with authority and provides a normal-language account of how the law provides for children with disabilities. He gives good contacts for learning more along legal lines. Lawrence Greene goes into some depth about private service providers and seems to have left no stone unturned on this issue. Finding Help When Your Child Is Struggling In School is a useful first reference book for parents and others with an interest in children who have learning difficulties.

Dutch professor of Philosophy's Hans Reinders' analysis is refreshing in a subject area, i.e. disability, where too often post-modernism is accepted as a workable context where the main aim is to achieve rights and choices for people with disabilities. Reinders shows how liberal society (and yes he discusses what that is)is limited in achieving advances for people with developmental disability because of its lack of a deep framework of morality. He shows this group as one that is particularly under threat from developments in genetics. As Reinders convincingly argues the difficulties for liberal society in safeguarding this vulnerable group are severely curtailed by its inability to resolve the inherent paradox between prevention of conditions seen as suffering and inclusion of people with disabilities as per Wolfensberger's normalisation and social role valorization theories. Where individual people make up their own meanings for their lives how do people without the ability to do so fare? They get devalued with risks of attendant negative implications, notably in developments in genetics. Reinders suggests that society is in need of a deep morality which may be found in the experiences and beliefs of caring families who have members with developmental disability. He uses Kenzaburo Oe's novel "A personal matter" with great impact in arguing for the inherent value of the lives of people with developmental disability, realised when we do dive deep into our own prejudices, preconceptions and fears. Reinders arguments fit well with Alasdair MacIntyre's (Dependent Rational Animals) conception of the nature of the human condition as consisting of acknowledged dependency and vulnerability in balance with autonomy for the flourishing of people to occur. Read Reinders and MacIntyre against the background of David Loye's myth-breaking "Darwin's lost theory of love" and you may strengthen your hopes about a more human/planet sustaining paradigm rising through the surface of our present day postmodern soup.

Reinders is not an easy read but his book, rich in its challenges to dominant asocietal assumptions, deserves to be widely read, in and outside of the disability area of interest. His arguments are clear, his language crisp. His is an important contribution to a quest for moral coherency in our confused times. As Reinders cleverly uses the lenses of genetics and developmental disability, inescapably the reader comes to the conclusion that what is true for vulnerable people with developmental disabilities is true for all of us. This book should feature in the required reading lists for disability- ,human service and ethical/philosophy studies. Highly recommended.

I found Stone's Handbook of Language and Literacy to be a very well documented compilation of studies dealing with various aspects of language and literacy development. This was a challenging tome as an introduction to the subject matter. Learning the "language" is always demanding. However, I really appreciated the extensive references, and the overviews of research done on the various topics.

I bought this book to assist me in understanding the WISC III and how it is interpreted so I could be knowledgeable at my daughter's PET meetings. Very technical and detailed.Wouldn't consider it to be easily read but once you sit down with a WISC exam and the book it becomes much easier to follow. Would suggest to professionals as well as parents.

This is a very inspiritational story of one mans quest to make it right for so many other people. A great little story of determination, will, and the pursuit of the ultimate dream....Freedom.

This textbook is user friendly. The sections flow in a sequential order, and the language used is easy to follow. The information is in-depth, and there are a lot of good resources listed in the text. Of all the special education textbooks I've used, this is one of the best.

This book has been a great resource to use while I am teaching at the high school level.

But dated. I got this book from my local library as a first stop on my "underachieving" kid. What he basically does is define four reasons why kids won't learn, and what to do about it.

This book is heavily psychologically oriented, which is good if this is what your child's problem is. He seems to really care about kids and their problems, and this comes through in his writing. However, if you have a child who is underachieving because of learning disabilities, this book is less helpful, however he does explain the psychological ramifications of low achievement.

One caveat: He brings a story towards the end of the book about Mark, a kid with severe psychological problems. I know this book was written quite a while ago, and I am not a diagnostician, but it seems to me that Mark would today be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, as opposed to a psychiatric disorder (high grades in math, carries his box around with him, etc). He berates the parents for not being aware of the problem, but I think that in this case he was wrong.

Papers on adults with learning disabilities from the 1994 Summit on Learning Disabilities organized by the National Center for Learning Disabilities. Topics include education, labor, justice, and health and human services. The section on employment is interesting and includes perspectives from several adults with learning disabilities who can serve as role models.

This review was originally published in the Annotated Bibliography of Learning A Living, A Guide to Planning Your Career and Finding A Job for People with Learning Disabilities, Attention Deficit Disorder and Dyslexia.